Update: GitHub Now Visualizes geoJSON (with MapBox and OpenStreetMap)

In just two weeks the GitHub folks have added more features to geoJSON visualization support, the most important of which for us non-programmers is the ability to embed the maps in Javascript supported HTML environments.

Want to make your geoJSON map available someplace other than GitHub? Simply modify this template, and place it in any HTML page that supports javascript, such as GitHub Pages, and you'll have a beautiful, portable map:

An e-mail from the folks at GitHub (though we'd already seen the buzz on Twitter) announces new mapping visualization on that platform. (Not sure what GitHub is? See Directions Magazine coverage.)

TL;DR: commit a .geojson file to a repository, and GitHub will render any points, lines, or polygons as an interactive map, complete with custom markers and tool tips. Plus, we're using MapBox under the hood, so every thing's OSM-backed.

So basically, if you put geodata in geoJSON form into your repository, it will be automagically rendered using Leaflet and MapBox Streets, which is built on OpenStreetMap. Here are some examples of how it looks on a few repository pages:

First off, this implementation secures the importance of geoJSON as an important format/encoding for geodata. The announcement sparked a bunch of discussion on Twitter about Esri's lack of support of geoJSON whch culminated wiht this tweet from Esri's Andrew Turner (@ajturner):